Man plans to live entire year online

Posted: Sunday, January 02, 2000

DALLAS (AP) - In an effort to prove how wired the world has become, a 26-year-old former computer systems manager walked into an empty Dallas house Saturday with little more than a donated laptop and an Internet connection.

Mitch Maddox will live exclusively online - ordering food, furniture, clothes and hosting a 24-hour live feed of his life - without leaving the house for an entire year.

"I'm going to come out being a loon," Maddox said Saturday after he'd locked himself into the two-story, two-bedroom house he's renting with friends. Moments later, he hunkered down with his laptop on the carpet floor of an upstairs room to start an online shopping spree to fill his barren home.

The first orders were for basics: shampoo, toilet paper, cleaning supplies and carry-out food.

"Our vision is that new online shoppers will go to our site to learn how to utilize e-commerce," said Maddox, who legally changed his name to DotComGuy for the marketing stunt.

The "live" part of the DotComGuy stunt involves a 24-hour streaming video fed by dozens of palm-sized digital cameras mounted on walls throughout the house. A camera points at the kitchen, several face the living room and one sits on a shelf in his bathroom - turned away from the toilet and bathtub, toward the sink.

"Yeah, that doesn't give me much room to towel off before I say good morning to the world," DotComGuy told visitors during a tour of the home.

In what sounds like a cross between the enviro-colonization experiment Biosphere and the films "The Truman Show" and "EdTV," DotComGuy's project has a few ground rules. He can have plenty of visitors, including corporate sponsors and Internet-industry notables, but he can't go farther than the back yard.

And he can use anything he can buy online.

"We certainly don't recommend that people lock themselves away from the world, but we will prove that it can be done," said Len Critcher, president of DotComGuy Inc. and a longtime friend of DotComGuy who helped establish the project about three months ago.